And
now I pay her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman!
There is a fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider
so that the spider can't shake it off: the grub fastens upon the
spider and drinks its heart's blood. That was how this woman fastened
upon me and sucks the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me
for being so stupid; that is, for marrying a woman like her. My
chivalry seems to her despicable. 'A wise man cast me off,' she
says, 'and a fool picked me up.' To her thinking no one but a pitiful
idiot could have behaved as I did. And that is insufferably bitter
to me, brother. Altogether, I may say in parenthesis, fate has been
hard upon me, very hard."

Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity
what it was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not
young--he was forty-one--lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with
a long nose, and grey hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning
voice, had a sickly smile, and waved his hands awkwardly as he
talked. He had neither health, nor pleasant, manly manners, nor
_savoir-faire_, nor gaiety, and in all his exterior there was
something colourless and indefinite. He dressed without taste, his
surroundings were depressing, he did not care for poetry or painting
because "they have no answer to give to the questions of the day"
--that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch him.
He was a poor farmer.

His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was
paying twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand
on personal securities as well. When the time came to pay the
interest on the mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked
every one to lend him money with as much agitation as though his
house were on fire, and, at the same time losing his head, he would
sell the whole of his winter store of fuel for five roubles and a
stack of straw for three roubles, and then have his garden fence
or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat his stoves. His meadows
were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle strayed in the undergrowth
in his woods, and every year the old trees were fewer and fewer:
beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden and kitchen-garden.
He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even ordinary capacity
for living like other people. In practical life he was a weak, naive
man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with good reason
called him "simple."

He